


The Days of Honey and Vinegar

by Froggimus_Rex



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Awkward Conversations, F/F, In Vino Veritas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-28 22:33:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16731891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Froggimus_Rex/pseuds/Froggimus_Rex
Summary: After the war, Tresh goes looking for answers.Problem is, she finds them.





	The Days of Honey and Vinegar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).



**Balmorra, 6 ABY**

From the outside the kindest word to describe the building was modest. A generic slab-sided boxy prefab, duracrete walls stained and dingy despite signs of recent cleaning, if it wasn't for the assorted collection of swoops and speeders out the front, sleek and incongruously gleaming, watched over by the kind of completely nondescript stock freighter owned by people of undefined yet assuredly utterly legitimate business, Tresh would've suspected that she'd been given the runaround instead of directions. That still might have happened. There wasn't even a sign, and this had hardly been a banner homecoming. The New Republic might have been handing out pardons and acquittals like candy, but they held little weight on a world whose relationship with the Republic and Empire alike had been contentious at best. Who could ever have predicted that?

Inside showed more promise. The walls and floors weren't spotless, that was never an option with a workshop that actually saw any work being done, but it was clearly being maintained and what tools she could see were stowed and organised. A compact and heavy-set Togruta woman in grease spattered coveralls was working on a swoop, clearly a custom job that had Tresh itching to see the plans. She couldn't be sure of her age but between the wrinkled skin and the length of her headtails and horns, Tresh guessed old. Old, but vital, and also completely unfamiliar. Still, she'd come this far and it'd hardly be the first time she'd looked the fool if she was wrong. "Jyoti Seona?"

The old woman didn't bother looking up from the engine. "Who wants to know?"

Tresh hadn't expected a crisp, pure Coruscanti accent of the kind that the academy instructors would have murdered for back in the day, and it only made her all the more aware of the Markaran vowels she'd finally stopped fighting. "Tresh. Tresh Kusak, you submitted evidence for a trial I was involved in." Her own. And now she had even less idea why, especially since she seemed to find the whole thing funny. Tresh resigned herself to this being a dead end, that the only record she'd been able to find of a Jyoti Seona being a year-old lease on her own homeworld was in fact just was that much of a coincidence.

Seona finally stopped laughing, then seemed to take pity on her. "I've done a lot of things, child, but giving evidence has never been one of them," she said. "It's my grandchild you want. _Jyoti!_ "

Ears ringing, Tresh didn't know what she expected but it wasn't the tall, rangy figure who came in the back entrance. "Is it urgent, Tika? I'm not really comfortable taking eyes off Chae right now." Unlike the elder Seona, she spoke with an unplaceable accent. At least until she caught sight of Tresh and trailed off.

A feeling not unlike a stun-baton to the gut spread through Tresh as she stared at the other woman awkwardly pushing thick black hair back off her face in an all too familiar gesture. "Janneke?"

Then, without even thinking about it, Tresh was on her, fists swinging. Completely uselessly, of course, Janneke had the better part of half a metre on her, had always been deceptively quick on her feet, and fought dirty to boot, but damn if trying didn't make some deep rage-filled part of her feel good. Soon enough though, her wrists were encircled in a grip as inescapable as any set of binders, if far gentler.

"I get that you're mad." It seemed the years hadn't affected her gift for dry understatement. "But I already have to rescue a colicoid from one of my grandmothers and I really don't need the other shooting you."

Stilling, Tresh looked back over her shoulder, and sure enough, Seona had a blaster trained on her with a casualness that would've been absurd if not for its steadiness. She frowned, looking back at Janneke. "Wait, what did you say about a colicoid?"

As if on cue a hideous hissing screech sounded through the door along with a triumphant cackle. "You're missing all the fun, girl!"

Janneke sighed and let go of her wrists to scrub her hand over her face. "We'll deal with _this_ after I deal with that," she said, and sent what Tresh considered an unfairly exasperated look over Tresh's shoulder. "Tika, please don't shoot my wife."

"Widow."

And if none of her punches had hit home, that did. Janneke winced before her mouth twisted into something resembling a grin. "Guess you're rooting for the colicoid, then."

That left Tresh alone with Seona and her blaster. "We'll wait on the ship," she said, gesturing Tresh along with the barrel. "Jyoti won't let me keep booze in the shop, and there are conversations that need it."

She clapped her hand on Tresh's shoulder. "Welcome to the family."

-

By the time Janneke, or Jyoti, or whatever she was calling herself now, joined them in the engine room, Tresh and Tika were two glasses deep into the bottle Tika had produced from behind the engine casin. While Tika seemed unaffected, Tresh was buzzed enough not to care that she was shamelessly ogling the decidedly non-stock engine from her place on the engine room's small acceleration couch and trying to reconstruct the plans in her head.

Coveralls stripped down to her waist, revealing a sleeveless undershirt and a fresh bacta dressing on her forearm, Janneke dropped an absent kiss between Tika's montrals, and Tresh focused on her glass to keep from tilting her face in hopes of the same. Stupid. "Chae wants to show off for you."

"Getting rid of the witnesses, child?"

Janneke grinned, the expression achingly familiar. "Yes. It's also true. Now, privacy, please."

She didn't sit down right away, instead pouring out and knocking back a glass with an ease that surprised Tresh, as did the intricate designs curling over broad shoulders and down her arms revealed by her sleeveless undershirt. "You're looking good for a dead woman, Janneke."

"Jyoti." She topped up her glass and put the bottle back on the floor. Slumping onto the opposite end of the acceleration couch, both closer and further away than Tresh would've liked, she ran her hand through her hair. It was shaggier than the regulation cut Tresh remembered, but still short and this close she could see flecks of silver around her temples. "No one's going to point a blaster at you if you feel like taking another swing."

Tresh could tell she was being deliberately provocative, but it still worked. The crack of flesh hitting flesh filled the room, Jyoti's head barely turning despite the impact leaving Tresh's palm stinging. "I mourned you." Tresh was shocked by her own vehemence. "I didn't even have a body to bury. Not that it mattered, because the ISB turned up before I could even plan a funeral." All this time she'd been grieving a lie.

Jyoti grimaced into her drink. "Sorry."

"For what? Lying to me? Using my security clearance for petty graft? Faking your death? Leaving me to take the fall?"

"It wasn't petty graft."

Of all the points to argue. "I saw the records during the investigation and my court martial. You'd been selling KYD trade secrets for months."

"Years actually." Somehow Jyoti had managed to empty her glass and was refilling it again. "But I used your clearance for a lot more than that. The graft was just to keep them from looking deeper if I ever got caught."

That cold, stun-baton feeling was back. "Excuse me?"

"You're one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. Surely you've figured it out by now?"

She had, but that didn't mean she wanted it to be true. "Nothing about you was real. Your name, your loyalties, your accent." 

The way her shoulders hunched defensively, just for a moment, should've made Tresh feel more vindicated than she did. "My accent? When yours was just as fake as mine and for the same reasons." The last was delivered in a pitch perfect version of the Deep Core accent Tresh'd forced her voice into from the academy to long after it mattered. "The Empire might've decided to make use of a Rim hick's knack with tools, but they wouldn't respect them one bit. "

Tresh had thought her peers short-sighted idiots for the way they'd dismissed Janneke, acting as if the transition between plan and prototype occurred purely through their own genius. Apparently they hadn't been the only idiots in the room. "And that made me what? Just your five year mission?"

"I never pretended to feel something I didn't." Which wasn't exactly the ringing denial Tresh didn't realise she'd been hoping for. "You weren't...nobody deliberately targeted you, but you made it clear you were interested, and the rebellion could hardly afford pass on that kind of opportunity."

Tresh stared at the bottom of her glass, and reached for the bottle. "An unmissable opportunity, that must have made it so much easier for you."

And there was the 'why are we having this conversation' sigh, Tresh hadn't missed that. "What do you want to hear, that it's easy to have someone offer you their heart and take it knowing exactly how you intend on repaying that trust?"

"I'd like the truth, I seem to recall there was something in our marriage vows about that."

Silence greeted Tresh's outburst then, softly, "I did a lot of things I can't bear to think about for the rebellion. For missions, covers, slivers of my soul traded for the cause. Sharing your life wasn't one them."

Tresh could have left it at that, kept sipping her drink, enjoying the warmth of Jyoti's hand on the ankle she couldn't quite recall putting up onto the couch. But she still had questions and she'd learnt far too late about avoiding the uncomfortable ones.

"Why did you leave?"

"What makes you think there was a why?" Jyoti stood, crossing to the workbench and sorting through the tools. "That I didn't just get sloppy and panic?"

"Please don't call me brilliant, then ask me to believe that after years of successfully hiding all of...this, it was your exit plan you slipped up on?" And suddenly finding something around their home that needed fixing the second she didn't want to discuss something had always been a dead giveaway.

Jyoti finally picked out a hydro-spanner. "I've known plenty of good agents who were made on less," she said, turning the tool over in her hands. "It was your promotion."

"The one where I needed an entirely new security clearance before they'd even tell me what it was for? Since I failed all those checks when the ISB found out my dead wife was neck deep in corruption, I never did find out." Which she was starting to suspect was the point.

Jyoti looked up. "I did. You were tapped for the Tarkin Initiative."

"You're joking." Tresh's work had been too valuable for her own good, but that was insane. She hadn't even been part of AWR. Even with the scramble to refill positions post-Yavin that kind of leapfrogging...

"I'm not. Years of hands-off deep cover, then they all but threw op-sec out the airlock for that briefing."

Tresh suddenly remembered an emergency personnel request that turned out to be a datawork error and a subdued, snappish mood blamed on a week in hyperspace with nothing show for it. "You were ordered keep it from happening."

"The opposite. The rebellion wanted you there as much as the Empire did." Jyoti's voice took on a Mid-Rim accent. "'This represents a unique intelligence opportunity. Think of the lives saved if we can stop another Death Star while it's still on flimsi.' Hells, even just securing solid proof the Initiative existed outside of rumour and conspiracy would've been a propaganda and recruitment tool credits couldn't buy."

Turned out Tresh didn't like having answers any more than questions, but she'd been the one to ask. "You. It was your decision."

"In one stroke, I disobeyed orders, blew a major long-term deep cover mission, and destroyed your career. Not bad for a day's work." Jyoti's words were flippant but her voice was almost a monotone, by now she'd put down the hydrospanner and was fiddling with something on hung on a cord around her neck. "I knew what the Empire did to its best and brightest. And while they were wringing horrors out of that brilliant mind of yours, I would have been waiting for either them or the rebellion to decide that you weren't actually that useful to them any more. By then I'd sacrificed a lot of things to the rebellion, my name, my skin, my soul, but I couldn't do that."

"And you didn't trust me enough to consider talking to me before leaping straight to faking your death?" Somehow Tresh found that more hurtful than the implication she might have ended up assassinated by her own wife.

Jyoti let out a short, sharp bark of laughter. The kind that almost sounded like crying. "I really did panic," she said, voice soft. "I knew it'd trash your clearance, there was a chance you'd get demoted, or even discharged. I forgot that the Empire was perfectly happy to take instead of ask."

"To be fair, I'd never really considered that either." Tresh had let herself stay ignorant for far too long to be able to claim any high ground here, and there was some small comfort in being able to blame something other than malice. "Not until my court martial ended with being fitted for a shock collar. That was a wake up call."

"I didn't know." Tresh didn't realise Jyoti was moving until she was crouching in front her, hands not quite touching hers. When Tresh glanced away from eyes gleaming with more than just sincerity, she caught sight of the object Jyoti'd been fiddling with earlier. "Not until after we'd taken Kuat. If I'd known, I would've done something, I'd have come for you."

Tresh had no reason to believe her, and literal years worth not to, but she did. Force help her, she did. "By yourself? That would've accomplished a lot."

"Yes," Jyoti replied without a single second hesitation. "Believe me, it would've been far from the dumbest or most reckless thing a member of my family's done for someone they loved."

Oh. There it was. 

She reached out, curling her fingers around the wedding ring strung around Jyoti's neck, the metal still warm from her skin. "Tresh? What are you doing?"

"Something dumb and reckless," Tresh echoed her words back at her, leaning in to close the distance between them. 

It wasn't like coming home. Her lips were as soft as Tresh remembered, but Jyoti didn't kiss like Janneke had. She was somehow both more hesitant and hungrier, hands hovering like she was afraid to touch her, even as she pressed Tresh back into the couch. No, it wasn't the least bit like coming home, but Tresh had already come to the conclusion that homecomings were overrated anyway.


End file.
